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Dutch "Scum Villages"

Amsterdam residents with a record of harassing their neighbors will be exiled, the cityís mayor announced. After being forced out, they will live under police supervision in special container housing units with only basic amenities.
*Authorities in the Dutch capital have formed a task force to identify the worst offenders behind the 13,000 complaints of antisocial behavior the city receives annually

Amsterdam-based daily Het Parool reported.

Those charged who defy a compulsory six-month course in the camps will face eviction and homelessness. Amsterdam Mayor Eberhard van der Laan has allocated an estimated 1.3 million euro to the project, which he argued will protect law-abiding residents from being forced to move by unruly neighbors.

Maybe the title should have been "Santa Clause is coming to town"?

What community would not want a policy like this? If not openly, than secretly.

I personally find the thought of this sort of policy chilling. But I also can't help thinking this idea is a little humorous in a whole family getting a time-out from their neighborhoods sort of way.

The world has an extensive record of communities evicting those seen as misfits: Jewish ghettos in Europe, Bantustans for blacks in apartheid South Africa and the Soviet Union’s unofficial ‘rule of 101 km,’ which banned criminals, dissidents and work-dodgers from living closer than 100 kilometers from large cities.

From the article. I'm not sure if those are apropos comparisons, but they certainly make the prospect of "scum villages" all the more unsettling.

Hmm, I can find three Dutch articles on it, (but not the original Parool one) and they seem to be the usual copy and paste kinda bs. There's one blog, two shitty newspapers. Doesn't mean it's not true, ofcourse. But if it were, I expected a bigger ruckus.

The world has an extensive record of communities evicting those seen as misfits: Jewish ghettos in Europe, Bantustans for blacks in apartheid South Africa and the Soviet Union’s unofficial ‘rule of 101 km,’ which banned criminals, dissidents and work-dodgers from living closer than 100 kilometers from large cities.

It's a bit harsh comparing this to the Amsterdam initiative, even if it were true.

Mmm. For some reason creating neighborhoods exclusively with antisocial people doesn't sound like a good idea. It just seem they are replicating the whole mentality of "putting the problems where I can't see them" that has devastated public housing planning around the world.

As someone who has lived next to "poorly socialized" neighbors, i.e. those who blare music at 2:AM, poison the gardens of those who complain, scream obscenities day and night, etc, I can only applaud such policies.

As someone who has lived next to "poorly socialized" neighbors, i.e. those who blare music at 2:AM, poison the gardens of those who complain, scream obscenities day and night, etc, I can only applaud such policies.

Can I decide that I just don't like my neighbor and deliberately launch a plethora of FALSE complants against him, just to push his household over the current numeric threshold of what constitutes "enough" complaints to get him and his whole family "re-homed"??

Can I decide that I just don't like my neighbor and deliberately launch a plethora of FALSE complants against him, just to push his household over the current numeric threshold of what constitutes "enough" complaints to get him and his whole family "re-homed"??

This being Holland, I'm sure it will require intense evaluation by social workers, a lot of time and in the end an ambiguous court-order which the family in question then can appeal, etc, etc.

I've posted this general sentiment before, but I think it's worth repeating ....

I wish we could go back to "the good old days" when the local no-good-nick would get approached by the sheriff, who was accompanied by a half dozen deputies, and the sheriff would say: "You've got until sundown to get out of town." That ultimatum was more of a for-your-own-good kind of a warning, because the unspoken second half of the ultimatum was "After sundown, when the lighting is poor and eye-witness accounts cannot be trusted, there's no telling what might happen to you at the hands of several dozen unidentified people who might very well come to your house in the middle of the night tonight and do whatever strikes their collective fancy." So the sheriff was actually doing the guy a favor by allowing him to exit town of his own free will, unmolested.

This was a non-legal solution to combatting non-criminal --yet still annoying as hell-- behavior. It was a highly expedited way to achieve non-violent social ostracization and/or community expulsion against a truly despicable individual. And it left the despicable person free to go wherever they wanted to and start over.

This Amsterdam thing seems like a very disturbing variation on actual imprisonment --and yet it's for for behavior (blaring steroes??) which in and of itself is NOT criminal.

While the Wild West solution of the sheriff's ultimatum was definitely a few hairs on the wrong side of legality, at least it was not a formally sanctioned governmental policy, and the sheriff flatout knew he needed to keep it as an off-the-books, vaguely-implied and barely-alluded to kind of a threat. But the "Amsterdam Solution" (I just made that up -- I rock!) is being touted in this news item as an actual governmental program, and any government-backed efforts at administering social conduct and molding social behavior really sets off my alarms.

and yet it's for for behavior (blaring steroes??) which in and of itself is NOT criminal.

No, not criminal. But devastating to peoples lives nonetheless. And the feeling of being powerless to improve on the situation is what makes it worst. I guess it's a utalitarian answer, but in these kinds of cases, the rights of the many outweigh the asocial behaviour of the few.

No, not criminal. But devastating to peoples lives nonetheless. And the feeling of being powerless to improve on the situation is what makes it worst. I guess it's a utalitarian answer, but in these kinds of cases, the rights of the many outweigh the asocial behavior of the few.

Not to mention there's sometimes criminal behavior (like poisoning pets) that occurs which is unprovable. You know it, everyone in the neighborhood knows it, the perpetrator may have even has bragged about it, but there's insufficient evidence to convict or even bring charges.

Sometimes people are forced to leave their homes because they cannot bear to live near such people. Sometimes, depending on the personalities involved, situations escalate and result in violence or even death.

The wild west solution of having the local cops run people out of town is fraught with at least as many problems as a policy which is open and subject (presumably) to review.

i get tired of the "but what if, what if . . . " scenarios. People who spend their lives deliberately making life miserable for other people don't deserve to live in society. Screw them.

It's too bad we don't have a separate continent to send them to -- I do have hope for Mars, though, someday.

I've posted this general sentiment before, but I think it's worth repeating ....

I wish we could go back to "the good old days" when the local no-good-nick would get approached by the sheriff, who was accompanied by a half dozen deputies, and the sheriff would say: "You've got until sundown to get out of town." That ultimatum was more of a for-your-own-good kind of a warning, because the unspoken second half of the ultimatum was "After sundown, when the lighting is poor and eye-witness accounts cannot be trusted, there's no telling what might happen to you at the hands of several dozen unidentified people who might very well come to your house in the middle of the night tonight and do whatever strikes their collective fancy." So the sheriff was actually doing the guy a favor by allowing him to exit town of his own free will, unmolested.

Well yes, but who gets to decide who the undesirables are? The Mayor? The Sheriff? Maybe OK if he is a genuinely good upstanding man of the the community, but how many of them are? And then who is he picking on? Could be the black guy shacked up with a white women, the quiet but Muslim recent arrival, the gay couple.
See why I don't think this is a good idea?

If I could have sent the kids that keyed my car, egged our house, threw our breakers in the middle of the night and left a dead rabbit on our porch to live in a container away from civilization, I would have.

But, I suspect, just like the police who showed up to investigate every incident, they would require some kind of proof before doing anything...

This is one of many threads here where the location of the fine line between allowing shitty people to do shitty-but-not-exactly-illegal things to everyone around them without restraint in the name of freedom and turning a society into a totalitarian dictatorship is discussed. And every time I feel a little sadder, because it seems to me the only sure solution is to somehow eliminate what seems to be a basic part of human nature, i.e. periodically being shitty to people around you. Even "good" and "nice" people are occasionally shitty to other people, even people they know and like. The main difference seems to be, nice people then feel bad about their shittiness and try to make amends for it.

Anyway, what I guess I'm trying to say is, I think this (the Amsterdam solution) is the sort of thing that sets a dangerous precedent, and is merely treating a minor symptom rather than the disease. What we need is some sort of radical restructuring of human society as a whole so that we are generally kinder, more courteous, and more empathic to those around us and/or affected by our actions. But I can't for the life of me even imagine how that could be achieved short of magic or divine intervention.

Well yes, but who gets to decide who the undesirables are? The Mayor? The Sheriff? Maybe OK if he is a genuinely good upstanding man of the the community, but how many of them are? And then who is he picking on? Could be the black guy shacked up with a white women, the quiet but Muslim recent arrival, the gay couple.
See why I don't think this is a good idea?

There's a reason why anyone ever says the phrase the "good old days" I start giving them the side eye.

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There's a reason why anyone ever says the phrase the "good old days" I start giving them the side eye.

The only people I've heard say they wish for the 'good old days' and 'why can't we go back to it?' - and these people tend to idolize the 1950s - are the kind of people that benefited from the privileges back then.

A whole lot of complaints I've heard from Dutch folks online (yeah, I know) are about the Muslim neighborhoods. When folks talk about rude or anti-social behavior, they often don't take into account that everyone doesn't consider the same things rude. It can run along ethnic lines, causing all sorts of problems.

In a time where more folks should be learning to get along with different people, laws are being proposed to call people out for things that aren't criminal. I don't like it.

I might like specific, small laws that apply to everyone (like noise ordinances); don't get me wrong. Having to move because the gov't tells you to sounds rather extreme, though. Way to shift the problem to someone else, too.

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This is one of many threads here where the location of the fine line between allowing shitty people to do shitty-but-not-exactly-illegal things to everyone around them without restraint in the name of freedom and turning a society into a totalitarian dictatorship is discussed. And every time I feel a little sadder, because it seems to me the only sure solution is to somehow eliminate what seems to be a basic part of human nature, i.e. periodically being shitty to people around you. Even "good" and "nice" people are occasionally shitty to other people, even people they know and like. The main difference seems to be, nice people then feel bad about their shittiness and try to make amends for it.

I think there's a difference between disagreements between otherwise nice people, and the sort of systematic harassment, fear, and damage that truly shitty neighbors can cause. Living next to some horrible neighbors right now, it's really discomforting knowing that the chances are slim to none that these people will ever be willing to deal with the conflict in a mature and peaceful way. I'm stuck living next to people whom I've had to call 911 on because of the violently abusive language one of them has used against my family. And that wasn't an isolated incident.

There are limits to how much you can resolve conflicts with people who are borderline criminal and possibly sociopathic.

That said, this policy makes me very uncomfortable. I would like to see my neighbors move far, far away, but I would not want to see them forced into a camp.